


They Fall in Love

by Im_All_Teeth



Series: One-Shots: Dramione [5]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Reincarnation, F/M, Fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-12
Updated: 2019-09-12
Packaged: 2020-10-16 23:22:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,223
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20611067
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Im_All_Teeth/pseuds/Im_All_Teeth
Summary: No matter how the story begins, it always ends the same way. They fall in love. Fluff.





	They Fall in Love

**Author's Note:**

> I didn't create this story format. It was shamelessly stolen from a short story that someone showed me once several (jesus fuck—THIRTEEN) years ago that follows roughly the same format (I swear this comment makes more sense if you just read the story). I don't, unfortunately, know the name or author of this story anymore. Just know that it was not mine first, and if you do know the author and title of the piece I'm talking about PLEASE let me know so that I can properly credit this. It was published in a short story anthology in or before 2006.
> 
> Originally published August, 2011 on ff.net. Updated for cringe-worthy grammar and spelling errors today.

_No matter how the story starts, it always ends the same way..._

**One**

It's the first day of school. Draco's eleven, and Hermione's going to be twelve in less than a month.

He is well off, of good standing in society, and his favorite activity is watching his father get ready for work in the morning.

She is well off, too, only in a completely different world, and she's terrified that she doesn't really belong here; that she's going to get off of this train and they're going to tell her that they made a mistake and that she is not, in fact, a witch.

He has friends and is eager to make more. His father wants him to befriend Harry Potter because Harry Potter is already famous and he is only eleven.

The first boy she meets on the train has teeth that are worse than hers, and he is upset because he lost his toad. Personally, she doesn't understand why a toad (of all things) is so important to the boy, but he's crying, so she helps him look for it and doesn't ask any questions.

Draco finds Harry Potter's train compartment only minutes before Hermione does. In fact, she slides open the compartment door and walks into him.

"Has anyone seen a toad? Neville's lost-" and that's when it happens.

They don't fall over together (that would be stupid) and the train does not choose that exact moment to turn, forcing him to catch her (the Hogwarts Express offers such a smooth ride, it can only be magic; she can't even feel it shake along the tracks). She walks into him and stops talking, and he turns around and looks down his sharp nose at her.

He doesn't reach out to touch her—neither moves at all. But something opens up between them, and for the first time in either of their short lives, they are both afraid and excited all at once, and neither of them knows why. They stare at each other without speaking, standing so close together that their noses were almost touching.

Someone says something and breaks the moment like glass.

Hermione looks at the other people in the compartment, focusing on the boy who spoke, says, "You have dirt on your nose. Did you know that?"

The boy with the dirt scowls, but the boy with the sharp moon-face, the one with the soft robes and gray eyes, who didn't catch her because she didn't fall, laughs. She decides that she likes his laugh and resolves to hear more of it.

Draco loves how to-the-point this strange, wild-haired girl is. She sees the world, and she speaks it in clipped tones. His father would approve of her, he thinks.

(She is a mudblood, and he is supposed to hate her. He is a bigot and a coward, and when she sees him with a candy, she should look around for a crying baby. They are both too young to know these things, too unsure of where they fit in a wide-mouth, sharp-toothed world.)

He doesn't know yet that she is inferior and because she has yet to learn that he is slimy, they both stay in the train car with strangers. And someone has to do something because both she and he are starting to look stupid.

Draco sends Crabbe and Goyle to help Neville find his toad so that Hermione can stay and talk. Names are given, introductions are made.

Draco is unendingly impressed with how much Hermione knows. He is beginning to think that "muggle-born" really means "knows everything." His father's diatribes against the invaders and infiltrators make more (and less) sense as he comes to believe that all muggle-borns—like this one—have swallowed libraries whole.

She likes that Draco is quick to defend her when Ron says something fowl (which he does with some frequency). When he laughs, her heart lurches. When he grins at her, she regurgitates facts about teeth.

-

When the four of them are standing, waiting for the Sorting Ceremony to start, Draco tells Hermione not to be worried, because she is a very clever witch and will undoubtedly be in Slytherin with him.

She doesn't think she wants to be in Slytherin, even if he is there, but he called her a witch, and that makes her a little less nervous. If he—from the kind of family that has entire footnotes in Hogwarts: A History—thinks it's true, maybe they won't send her away after all.

She, Harry, and Ron are all in Gryffindor, and Draco is in Slytherin. She spends the feast staring across the Great Hall at him. The other Gryffindors seem nice, but she doesn't know the names of half of the foods she sees, and she wants to ask someone how ghosts could exist. Draco catches her eye and smirks at her. She smiles back.

-

Draco is a peripheral figure that first year. When Ron insults her, she runs crying to the stretch of brick that marks the Slytherin Common Room and waits while a fifth-year goes in to retrieve Draco, who comes out with his mouth a thin-pressed line of worry. They sat out by the lake, enjoying the giant squid at autumn air. They skip the Halloween feast. They don't even learn there was a troll in the dungeons until much later.

Her best friends are Harry and Ron, but she sits next to Draco in the classes they share.

He does the same for her, no matter what Pansy Parkinson or the older students say.

At the end of the year, when Quirrell suddenly disappears, and he hears whispers of Harry and "his two friends" in the hospital wing, Draco runs to the infirmary just to see that she is perfectly fine and Madame Pomfrey was running some routine tests. He doesn't leave until she does.

She tells him everything, which only makes it worse. No one beats the Dark Lord. No one survives once He has marked them out. He was right to be afraid for her, but she uses His name freely and doesn't understand why Draco's so upset.

Forever after this, when Draco Malfoy thinks of the Dark Lord, he remembers the cold weight sloshing in his stomach as he ran toward the hospital wing.

They exchange owls through June and July, although his letters are much more interesting than hers. He spends the summer traveling the wizarding world with his family, and she mostly details the books she reads.

In August, the letters stop suddenly, and at first Hermione is annoyed—he could at least have the decency to answer—and then worried—he'd just been joking when he called her letters book reports, right?—and finally sad—after she finished a book, she'd pick up a quill to start a letter only to remember no one in the whole world wanted to know what she thought about it.

When she sees him through a compartment window on the train ride back to school, she isn't sure if she should talk to him or not. Thankfully, he decides for her.

"Do you know what a mudblood is?" He asks it so quietly that she had to hold her breath to hear him.

She shakes her head. The way her hair flops with the motion reminds him of a cocker spaniel. It made his heart twist in a way he had already associates with Hermione Jean Granger: The Only Girl Draco Malfoy Talks To (willingly).

"It's a filthy word for Muggle-Born. If anyone ever calls you that word," his lip curls in disgust, "you tell me. My father will make them pay." (It isn't true. His father would do no such thing, but she doesn't need to know this uncomfortable familial secret. Not yet.)

She isn't sure why he is so angry, but his moods have always been fickle, and he is always so anxious to be entirely understood, so she nods and remains quietly confused.

When Mrs. Norris is petrified, Draco pulls her aside after class and tells her to watch her back. He starts following her from class to class and stares down his nose at anyone who asks about it.

Ron starts calling them, "Dramione" because saying their names separately was "too much work."

They both hate it.

When the attacks get worse, Draco sets up a schedule so that Hermione was always walking with at least one of her friends. Ron and Harry walk her to breakfast. After breakfast, she walked with them to her morning class. Draco meets her after class, walks her to lunch, and then haunts the library while she studies in the afternoon. At dinner, she sits with Harry and Ron, and the three of them walk back to the common room together. Crabbe and Goyle make occasional guest appearances, and it is from these two who she escapes on her way to the Quidditch pitch, too full of epiphany to worry about safety.

After Hermione is petrified, Draco takes up residence beside her bed in the hospital wing, although he still has to leave for meals and class (his father had threatened to transfer him to Durmstrang if his grades didn't improve).

-

In their third year, Hermione accompanies Draco to the hospital wing after his run-in with the Hippogriff.

"I'm dying," moans Draco, who brushes up against Hermione as he walks along beside her. He pretends he's staggering, but really he just wants to be close to her. The injury might be feigned (he's admitting to nothing), but the fear was real.

"You most certainly are not," she replies. Her mind is running in directions she doesn't like. What if Hippogriff talons were poisonous? What if he was going into shock? What if there was some internal damage done and not just Draco being his usual, overly-dramatic self? (She's read "Romeo and Juliet." She knows how Mercutio dies while no one takes him seriously.) She waits in a chair beside Draco's bed for the whole ten minutes it takes Madame Pomfrey to heal his arm.

"Why are you wearing your arm in a sling?" Hermione asks as they wander around the castle, waiting for class to end (Draco had wheedled Hermione into skipping with him, he wasn't quite sure how).

"Because it looks like I'm a battle-hardened hero," he replies. Wasn't it obvious?

"I think you look silly."

"Well, you're just a witch. And a muggle-born one at that. How are you supposed to know what looks cool to wizards?"

She punches him in the opposite shoulder, but not hard, and tells him that he's too old to be thinking that witches were gross.

Draco did not wear the cast to the Great Hall that evening.

Draco is still trying to convince his father not to have "That Animal" put down when Harry, Ron, and Hermione met Sirius Black for the first time. Draco, who has spent his entire life among Death Eaters didn't see what the huge deal about Black being on the loose was in the first place, and so accepts Harry's story. Once he has been informed. Three days after the fact, which he pretends doesn't sting.  
-

In the summer between their third and fourth year, Draco convinces his parents to buy premium Quidditch World Cup tickets for the same box as Arthur Weasely's family. Much to Draco's mortification, his mother spends the entire time looking like she has something fowl immediately under her nose. Desperate to keep the attention off of his displeased parents, he boasts to Ron and Harry about his Veela ancestry (Hermione doesn't seem to be listening or, if she is, doesn't seem impressed).

"Yeah," Ron laughs, "You're girly enough to be one."

Draco scowls and spends the rest of the game explaining the philosophy of Quidditch to Hermione.

It was a perfect afternoon.

That night, though, his father, angry-eyed and mumbling about blood traitors in his own family, starts drinking. The bottles are emptied and shattered against the nearest wall, and then his father is shouting to the entire hotel that his son, "had been flirting with a filthy, little, bushy-haired mudblood." When silver masks materialize on the faces of both of his parents and most of their adult friends, Draco, stomach tight with fear, runs to the edge of the woods, where he attempts to look cool for Hermione while telling her to, "Keep her bushy head down unless she wanted to be flashing her knickers in midair." His hands shake, so he crosses his arms over his chest. His eyes sting, so he sneers.

She ignores the hair comment (he is always saying things like that) and begins tearing at the ragged edges of her nails until Draco puts an arm around her shoulders and leads her into the woods. The woods are quiet. The dark is safe. After that, for some reason, although she logically knew she should be scared, she can't feel anything besides the weight of his bony fingers on her arm.

Draco takes Hermione to the Yule Ball in their fourth year, and Ron punches him in the face, breaking his nose with a sickening squish. Hermione doesn't speak to Ron for two whole months afterward, although Draco had been much quicker to forgive (once his nose had been repaired with no lasting cosmetic damage, and he had sent a return punch that gifted Weasely with an impressively black eye).

They hold hands while they watch Harry compete in the last two tasks. When Harry tells them all that Voldemort is back, Draco looks more terrified than all the rest of them combined. He squeezes Hermione's hand until her fingers turned purple. She doesn't tell him to let go.

In their fifth year, Hermione got a Howler from Madame (never Mrs.) Malfoy for playing her son for a fool after Rita Skeeta published an article detailing her romantic relationship with both Draco and Harry. As the head of the Inquisitorial Squad, Draco keeps Umbridge's forces away from the DA until some stupid Ravenclaw (Marietta, Hermione told him for the tenth time) snitches directly to Umbridge herself.

When Hermione catches Rita Skeeta in a jar near the end of the semester, Draco is so impressed that he kisses her. Right there, in the middle of the empty classroom. In retrospect, that may not have been the best move, because once he starts kissing her, he can't keep himself from repeating the transgression at every opportunity.

Draco runs away from home in his sixth year. He stays at Hogwarts during the school year and goes to Hermione's house for Christmas. It is the first time he had been "Among the Muggles" and was absolutely tickled by the Microwave Oven, especially after he blew up an egg in it. Once they get used to his clumsy arrogance, the Drs Granger don't mind their daughter's sharp-featured boyfriend—he pulls out the chair for her at every meal; he laughs at her jokes. They say he can back whenever he wants (provided he never touches a single cooking device ever again).

He quits school at the end of the year because his parents disown him and he cannot afford tuition on his own. It really wouldn't be safe for him, anyway, with Dumbledore dead. Blood-traitor and all that.

Draco spends what should have been his seventh year working with Lee Jordan on Potterwatch, although he rarely contributes anything constructive. He is much too worried about Hermione to focus. Mostly he mopes dramatically across any available surface. Lee announces this periodically, and whenever he does, Hermione huddles around the radio like it's a source of heat in the dead of winter. Draco Updates, as Lee calls them, keep her going when she wants to stop. She has someone waiting for her; she has a reason to keep going.

Draco, sidelined and useless, tries (and fails) not to be jealous. He knows that Hermione is closer to Harry than he ever was (The Boy Who Lived and the Weasel were so close that they may have been lovers, Draco thinks savagely to himself while peeling potatoes in Mrs. Weasley's kitchen). Crookshanks brushes up against his leg, and he consoles himself with the fact that, while Potter and the Weasel are off being heroes, he's ingratiating himself with her cat, which has to be worth something. He tries (and fails) to train Crookshanks to attack anyone with red hair. Just in case.

Jealousy and resentment might dog him through the day, but it's fear that curls up next to him in bed. What if someone catches Hermione? He knows better than most what Death Eaters did to Muggle-borns. It was even worse than what they did to blood traitors (devilishly handsome young pure-blood wizards who were dating muggle-born witches with bad hair), and he had scars and nightmares from that (the days before he had left home were few but painful).

Word comes from somewhere that a battle is coming. That he will be going back to Hogwarts one last time. He just has to be patient for a little bit longer. He can have Hermione all (or mostly) to himself after that. He would never let her out of his site after this was all over. He would take her back to the manor (his parents would change their minds and let him come home, of course, after this mess ended) and they would get married and have one child, and they would grow old and boring and tragically well-dressed together. Afterward. All he had to do was hold out for another month or so. Close his eyes and fire a few spells at the people he'd grown up thinking of as gods.

-

When the war is over, the bodies are buried, and the living shake hands with their ghosts and get down to the uninteresting business of continuing their lives.

Draco takes over the family business of being preposterously wealthy and stunningly social while Hermione repeats her last year of schooling. He tries to dissuade her from pursuing her magical-creature-crusade in the ministry. (He'd already given clothes to all of the Malfoy house-elves and paid them all fair wages. Wasn't that enough? What more could she possibly want?)

Hermione Granger is adamant, though, so Draco gives up trying to reason with her and buys her books instead.

When he proposes, she says yes.

But only after she gets her promotion and he has already asked twice.

When he asks if she would mind having children, please, because he needed an heir, please, she gave him twins. Probably, he supposes, just to be difficult.

They named the children Rose and Scorpius.

When Rose and Scorpius go to Hogwarts, both are in Ravenclaw, which was a perfect compromise for their parents, as neither was happy.

When the kids leave school and have careers and hesitant families of their own (neither of them wanted the family business, which Draco begrudgingly offered to Ron and Luna's son, Abbott, who is dashing enough and dapper enough to do the position justice), Draco Malfoy and Hermione Granger (she kept her last name) set about living as close to happily ever after as they possibly could. Draco takes up Wizard Golf, and Hermione writes mystery novels.

Draco dies in a golf course explosion at age ninety-two and Hermione turns the East Wing of Malfoy Manor into the largest library in the wizarding world. She dies a year later. Peacefully, in her sleep, with a faint smile on her thin lips.

* * *

**Two**

They'd known each other since childhood, but they weren't forced into close proximity until after the war.

He was an avid player of wizard golf, and a freak explosion had melted the left side of his face and his right arm. They were magical burns, and so could not be healed by natural means, but were not life-threatening. Draco had money to waste and vanity to indulge, so he purchased the services of the best healer in the business.

Hermione Granger was the best healer in the business, and although she rarely dealt with cosmetic injuries, Malfoy would make an enormous contribution to the charity of her choice if she helped him.

Over the next few months, Draco was forced to recognize that there was more to her than a bushy-haired mudblood (although she was still definitely bushy-haired and a mudblood). Hermione, for her part, grew to enjoy the time she spent with her well-read and challenging patient, despite their unhappy past.

She would spend her breaks sitting in the chair beside his bed, and they passed far too much time arguing about Kafka and Bagshot. One spring evening, while Hermione was sitting in her usual spot, using her hands to illustrate the importance of counter-clockwise stirring in a specific healing potion, Draco noticed suddenly how the light hit her hair in such a way to make it seem glowing. He realized that his mouth moved into a (slightly deformed and melted) smile every time she smiled, even if he wasn't happy. She had small wrists and always wore sensible shoes. He realized, very suddenly, that he was in love with her.

But what could he do? He was a deformed man who, even worse, had spent their entire childhood acting like an asshole. He saw the error of his ways, but it was too late for romance. He'd lost his chance (if he'd ever had one at all). He asked to be switched to a different healer.

Hermione, upon learning her favorite patient had asked to be transferred, could not contain her fury. As soon as her shift ended, she flew like a fiendfyre to Malfoy's room and proceeded to ask (as venomously as she possibly could) why on earth he had requested Healer Finnegan.

Perhaps it was the painkillers that Finnegan had given him (in liberal doses), or maybe it was the fever that the new healer had neglected to notice, or maybe it was just absolute misery and a certainty of rejection that loosened his tongue, but for whatever reason, Draco simply said, "Because I love you, and seeing you every day while knowing I could never have you was killing me."

"Don't be silly. A few scars never killed anyone." Then, processing the rest of his sentence, her eyes widened in horror. She backed slowly out of the room, and walked down the hallway, her sensible shoes squeaking on the linoleum floor. She walked faster and faster, and by the time she reached the apparition point, she was running and crying and gasping for breath. If anyone had asked, she wouldn't have been able to explain why she felt like her heart had been cracked open. She'd only be able to say that something had dug its claws into her chest and now she was leaking all the tears she hadn't cried after the War ended. All these years later, her ghosts were coming home to roost. Somehow, Draco Malfoy had fixed something inside her that had been broken for so long she had forgotten it had ever been another way.

It might have ended there. Hermione didn't go to visit Draco at all (although Healer Finnegan had been replaced by an older, more experienced Healer who was not quite so generous with the pain potions). It wasn't that she was avoiding him, though. Oh no. She was thinking.

Two weeks after Draco had returned to the Manor, Hermione sent him an owl asking him to a casual dinner date in Hogsmeade the Friday after next. He sent back an extremely formal acquiescence.

He laughed at her jokes, and she decided she loved the sound of his laugh and resolved to hear more of it. Her eyes neither lingered nor skipped over the scarred side of his face. She insisted on paying for dinner (probably, he supposed, just to be difficult), so Draco bought the after-dinner drinks and kissed her on her doorstep that night.

At some point, Draco proposed. Then he proposed again. He proposed a third time following the party for her promotion to the chief of internal medicine, and she finally—finally—said yes.

They had twins named Rose and Scorpius who were both Ravenclaws and completely unlike either of their parents, which was probably for the best.

Draco started playing golf again, which Hermione had always said would be the death of him.

Sometimes Hermione hated being right.

After that, deaths by golf-explosions featured prominently in the detective novels Hermione had started writing after her retirement, which were getting darker and more hopeless with each passing month.

She turned the Manor into the most extensive wizarding library on the British Isles, and when the time came, she died peacefully, like letting out a long sigh.

* * *

**Three**

They are both muggles, although neither of them has ever heard that word.

She is an intern at his father's company, and he is at once fascinated with and repelled by her. Her wit pulls him in. Her friends push him away again. (One is a very famous celebrity and the other whose purpose in life Draco never quite discerns.) Draco fights with the latter and gets his nose broken, although the plastic surgeon assures him that no cosmetic damage er was done.

She can't stand him at first because he is an arrogant prat. But something is endearing in the way he calls her name. The clumsy way he talks of his father the way she imagines Job might have talked about god if he'd been in on the joke. ("Who names their only son Draco, anyway?" she asks him) ("The same sort of pretentious ass who names their only daughter Hermione," he replies.) She sees parallels she'd rather not have noticed: neither of them like poetry, but both of them like bad kung-fu movies and good whiskey. Eventually, it seems logical that they do (or don't do) these things together. When Ron punches Draco in the face, she stops talking to Ron for months, and it is only when she examines the potency of her anger that she realizes her concern is not that of a friend but something more romantic.

She falls in love suddenly, but can't think of a way to tell him. It tears her up inside, knowing that she wants him so desperately but can never have him (he's engaged to the heiress of another large company) (Draco and Hermione, in this lifetime, are Whiskey-and-Movie friends, with a side-order of Getting-Punched-By-Her-Friends). She quits her job and marries Ron, who has always loved her. They have a son named Abbott. Hermione dreams about two young children, who look a little bit like her and a little bit like someone she loved a long time ago and still tries to forget. It feels like a memory she never really had, and she always wakes up crying.

Years later, she runs into Draco in a bakery in New York City, which is Just About the Strangest Thing That's Ever Happened to Her. They get to talking. He is a happy widower. She and Ron have been divorced for a decade (they were always just better off as friends). Abbott is in his twenties. Draco has only ever loved Hermione and Hermione, blushing, realizes that she has only ever loved him, too, and that she was a fool to have run off without telling him how she felt.

They elope on a beach in New Jersey and retire to Long Island, where she spends her time writing mystery novels, and he takes up golf.

Somewhere in the world, a Rose and a Scorpius meet and feel strangely connected. They mistake this for romance and go out on a single date, which is not at all romantic, but a lot of fun. They remain friends, and people frequently ask if they are siblings.

Draco gets struck by lightning while playing a game on a perfectly sunny day in June. He is ninety-two.

Hermione never goes back to England, but through phone calls and emails, she establishes Draco's old mansion as the largest public library in the UK. Since Draco and Astoria never had any children, Abbott inherits Draco's company.

The months after Draco's death are long and lonely. Whenever she writes anything, it comes out too bleak to be publishable. The night she passes away, she dreams about Draco and two small children she thinks she recognizes from somewhere (maybe a movie). Hand-in-hand, the four of them turn toward the light and head for home. She dies with a smile on her face.

* * *

**Four**

Voldemort wins the war, and Hermione is given to Draco as a prize.

This one is complicated. She cannot, as a rule, love her captor, no matter how lovely her cage may be. He does something to prove to her that he is not a monster. His motivation is, of course, called into question, and it comes to light that he is in love with her. Has been for years. Or that he's been working with the Order of the Phoenix all along. Or maybe he does not explain and leaves her wondering (he's always had a flair for the dramatic). Whatever the reason, she begins to feel stirrings in a heart she thought had died long ago.

In this scenario, they do not live to a ripe old age. He dies protecting her, and she lives to remember him. Or she dies protecting him and he, like any good and loyal companion, lays down on her grave and never wakes up.

The memories aren't all good, but they aren't all bad, either. She keeps a card catalog of them in her head. If she wrote it out in books, it would be the largest library in Wizarding England. She wonders what their children would have looked like.

Death comes for him like a bolt of lightning on a clear day.

When death comes for her, she is smiling.

* * *

**Five**

In one distinct variation, Hermione marries Ron, sure that the way her heart races when she sees Draco (who she runs into everywhere) is due to a life-long hatred. Draco marries Astoria Greengrass and wakes up some mornings after a dream he can't quite remember, wondering where his real wife is, and why Daphne's Little Sister is asleep in his bed.

Hermione ignores the way, "My, he's gotten so big!" runs through her head when she sees Scorpio for the first time and Draco resists the urge to hug Rose to his chest and keep her safe from the world.

He dies in a freak golf accident, and Astoria inherits his fortune, which she splits with Blaise Zabini, her lover. Hermione grows old and plump and dies with a smile on her face, which her husband doesn't even notice through his tears.

Nobody really likes this version, and so it is mostly ignored.

* * *

**Six**

They meet. It doesn't matter when or where. He is usually rich. She is always brilliant.

They fall in love. If they have children, they have twins named Rose and Scorpius.

Death claims them both, the way it claims every frail and beating thing in this world.

* * *

**Seven**

They love each other with the sort of passion that poets write about (although neither of them likes poetry).

They die.

* * *

**Eight**

Love wins.


End file.
